The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins Read online

  All organized education of girls had been ended by Henry VIII’s dissolution of the nunneries; but primary education was offered gratis to any boy in reach of a town. Elizabeth opened 100 free grammar schools; James I and Charles I would found 288 more. For lads of pedigree there were already established “public” schools at Winchester, Eton, St. Paul’s, and Shrewsbury; now were added Rugby (1567), Harrow (1571), and the Merchant Taylors’ School (1561), where Richard Mulcaster left a great pedagogical name. The curriculum was classical plus flogging, and the Anglican religion was compulsory in all schools. At Westminster School classes began at seven and ended at six, with humane interludes for breakfast at eight and a cat nap and short recess in the afternoon. Parents were resolved that the school should fill to the full one of its main functions—to relieve them of their children.

  Oxford and Cambridge still monopolized university education. They had fallen, during the turmoil of the Reformation, from their medieval authority and myriad registrations, but they were recovering, and each had some 1,500 students in 1586. At Cambridge Sir Walter Mildmay endowed Emmanuel College (1584), and Frances, Countess of Sussex and aunt of Philip Sidney, founded Sidney Sussex College (1588). At Oxford, Jesus College was set up by governmental and other funds (1571), and Wadham (1610) and Pembroke (1624) were added under James I. Cambridge was thrilled in 1564 by a visit from the Queen. She listened with modest demurrers to a Latin oration in her praise; at Trinity College she replied in Greek to a Greek address; on the streets she bandied Latin with the students; finally she herself made a Latin speech expressing the hope that she might do something for learning. Two years later she visited Oxford, gloried in the lovely halls and fields, and, departing, cried out fervently, “Farewell, my good subjects! farewell, my dear scholars! and may God prosper your studies!”19 She knew how to be a queen.

  Other Englishwomen rivaled her in erudition. The daughters of Sir Anthony Coke were famous for their learning, and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, made her mansion at Wilton a salon of poets, statesmen, and artists, who found in her a mind capable of appreciating their best. Such women received most of their education from tutors at home. Grammar schools were open to both sexes, but public schools and universities were for men only.

  It was a sign of the times when Elizabeth’s ablest financier set up in London (1579) Gresham College for law, medicine, geometry, rhetoric, and other studies useful to the business class; he specified that the lectures were to be given in English as well as in Latin, since “merchants and other citizens” would attend.20 Finally, for the moneyed or titled class, education was completed by travel. Students went to Italy to finish their medical and sexual training or make acquaintance with Italian literature and art, and many learned to like France on the way. Language was then no barrier, for every educated man in Western and Central Europe understood Latin. Nevertheless, when the travelers returned, they brought home some rubbing of Italian and French, and a special fondness for the easy morals of Renaissance Italy.

  III. VIRTUE AND VICE

  “Every schoolboy” knows Roger Ascham’s denunciation of the “Italianate” Englishman (1563):

  I take going thither [to Italy] … to be mervelous dangerous … Vertue once made that countrie mistress over all the worlde. Vice now maketh that countrie slave to them that before were glad to serve it… I know diverse that went out of England, men of innocent life, men of excellent learnyng, who returned out of Italie … neither so willing to live orderly, nor yet so liable to speak learnedlie, as they were at home before they went abroad … If you think we iudge amiss … heare what the Italian sayth … Englese Italianato e un diabolo incarnato … I was once in Italie myself, but I thanke God my abode there was but ix days. And yet I saw in that litle tyme, in one Citie, more libertie to sinne, than ever I hard tell of in our noble Citie of London in ix years.21

  Elizabeth’s tutor was not the only one who strummed this tune. “We have robbed Italy of wantonness,” wrote Stephen Gosson in The Schoole of Abuse (1579); “compare London to Rome, and England to Italy, you shall find the theaters of the one, and the abuses of the other, to be rife among us.” Cecil advised his son Robert never to allow his sons to cross the Alps, “for they shall learn nothing there but pride, blasphemy, and atheism.”22 Philip Stubbs, a Puritan, in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), described the Elizabethan English as wicked, vainly luxurious, and proud of their sins. Bishop Jewel, in a sermon before the Queen, lamented that men’s morals in London “make a mockery of God’s Holy Gospel, and so become more dissolute, more fleshly, more wanton than ever they were before … If our life should give testimony and report to our religion … it crieth out … ‘There is no God.’ ”II23

  Much of the jeremiads was the exaggeration of moralists fuming against men and women who no longer took to heart the terrors of hell. Probably the bulk of the population was no worse or better than before. But just as the Puritan minority tightened its morals, purses, and lips, so a pagan minority agreed with many Italians that it was better to enjoy life than fuss about death. Possibly Italian wines, popular in England, helped to broaden morals as well as arteries, and more lastingly. From Italy, France, and classical literature may have come a franker sense of beauty, though saddened with a keener consciousness of its brevity. Even the beauty of the youthful male aroused the Elizabethan soul and pen; Marlowe made Mephistopheles praise Faust as fairer than the skies,24 and Shakespeare’s sonnets fluttered between homosexual and heterosexual love. Woman’s loveliness was now no mere poetic conceit, but an intoxication that ran through the blood, the literature, and the court, and turned pirates into sonneteers. For at the court women added wit to cosmetics and captured men’s minds as well as their hearts. Modesty was an invitation to the chase and doubled beauty’s power. Litanies to the Virgin were lost in deprecations of virginity. Romantic love burst into song with all the ardor of denied desire. Women gloried in seeing men fight for them, and gave themselves, in marriage or without, to the victor. It was significant of the decline in the authority of religion that no church sanction or ceremony was now required for the validity of marriage, though the admission was considered an offense to public morals as distinct from law. Most marriages were arranged by the parents after a mutual courtship of properties; then the dizzy goddess of the hour became a disillusioned housekeeper, dedicated to children and chores, and the race survived.

  A worse laxity of morals marked public life. Graft, petty or magnificent, ran through the official services; Elizabeth connived at it, as excusing her from raising salaries.25 The war treasurer made £16,000 a year besides his pay; by a time-honored swindle the captains kept dead soldiers on the list, pocketed their stipends, and sold the uniforms allotted to them;26 a soldier was worth more dead than alive. Men in high places took large sums from Philip II to turn English policy to Spanish ends.27 Admirals practiced piracy and sold slaves. Clergymen sold ecclesiastical emoluments.28 Apothecaries could be persuaded to concoct poisons, and some doctors to administer them.29 Tradesmen adulterated goods to the point of international scandal; in 1585 “more false cloth and woolen was made in England than in all Europe besides.”30 Military morals were primitive; unconditional surrender was in many cases rewarded with massacre of soldiers and noncombatants alike. Witches were burned, and Jesuits were taken down from the scaffold to be cut to pieces alive.31 The milk of human kindness flowed sluggishly in the days of Good Queen Bess.

  IV. JUSTICE AND THE LAW

  The nature of man, despite so many centuries of religion and government, still resented civilization, and it voiced its protest through a profusion of sins and crimes. Laws and myths and punishments barely stemmed the flood. In the heart of London were four law schools, the Middle Temple, the Inner Temple, Lincoln’s Inn, and Gray’s Inn, collectively known as the Inns of Court. Law students resided there as other students dwelt in the halls or colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. Only “gentlemen” of blood were admitted; all graduates were sworn to the service of the Crown; their lead
ing or easily led lights became judges in the Queen’s courts. Judges and lawyers, in action, wore impressive robes; the majesty of the law was half sartorial.

  The courts were by common consent corrupt. One member of Parliament defined a justice of the peace as “an animal who, for half-a-dozen chickens, would dispense with a dozen laws”;32 Francis Bacon required higher inducements. “Plate sin with gold,” said Shakespeare’s saddened Lear, “and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.”33 As judges were removed at the Queen’s pleasure, they weighed it in their judgments, and royal favorites accepted bribes to induce her interference with decisions of the courts.34 Jury trial was maintained except for treason, but the juries were often intimidated by the judges or other officers of the Crown.35 Treason was loosely defined to include all actions endangering the life or majesty of the sovereign; such cases could be summoned before the Star Chamber—the Privy Council in its judicial capacity; there the defendant was denied jury trial, counsel, and habeas corpus, he was subject to exhausting interrogation or torture, and he was usually condemned to imprisonment or death.

  Criminal law relied on deterrents rather than surveillance or detection; laws being weak, punishments were severe. Death was the statutory penalty for any of two hundred offenses, including blackmail, cutting down young trees, and stealing more than a shilling; in an average Elizabethan year eight hundred persons were hanged in Merrie England for crime.36 Minor crimes were punished by the pillory, the stool, whipping at the cart’s tail, burning a hole in the ears or the tongue, cutting out the tongue, or cutting off an ear or a hand.37 When John Stubbs, a Puritan lawyer, wrote a pamphlet condemning Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to Alençon as a surrender to Catholicism, his right hand was cut off by order of a magistrate. Holding up the bleeding stump, and raising his hat with his left hand, Stubbs cried, “Long live the Queen!”38 Philip Sidney sent Elizabeth a protest against the barbarity, and Cecil, ashamed, gave Stubbs a government sinecure. Torture was illegal, but the Star Chamber used it. We perceive that despite the profound and powerful literature of the age, its general level of civilization had not yet reached that of Petrarch’s Italy or Avignon, much less that of Augustus’ Rome.

  V. IN THE HOME

  English life began by risking infantile mortality, which was high. Sir Thomas Browne was a leading physician, yet six of his ten children died in childhood.39 Then there were epidemics, like the “sweating sickness” of 1550 and the plague visitations of 1563, 1592–94, and 1603. Tenure of life must have been low; one calculation places it at eight and a half years.40 Men matured and grew old faster than today. Those who survived were the hardy, and their adventures with death toughened them for stratagems and spoils.

  Sanitation was improving. Soap was graduating from a luxury to a necessity. About 1596 Sir John Harington invented a flush toilet. Private bathrooms were few; most families used a wooden tub placed before an open fire. Many towns had public baths, and Bath and Buxton provided fashionable bathing establishments for the upper classes. “Hot houses” offered sweat baths and facilities for meals and assignations. Only the well-to-do had their own domestic water supply; most families had to fetch water from public conduits opening at ornamental spouts.

  Houses in villages and towns were built of plaster and brick, under roofs thatched with straw; Anne Hathaway’s cottage near Stratford-on-Avon is a well-restored example. In the cities dwellings usually adjoined each other, used more brick and stone, and had tiled roofs; mullioned bay windows and overhanging upper stories make them attractive to unfamiliar eyes. Interiors were decorated with carvings and pilasters; fire places gave the main room or “great hall” dignity and warmth; and ceilings—of timber or plaster—might be cut into symmetrical or fanciful designs. Chimneys took off the smoke that had formerly sought exit through a hole in the ceiling, and stoves were helping the hearth. Glass windows were now common, but night lighting was still by torch or candle power. Floors were covered with rushes and herbs, sweet-smelling when fresh, but soon malodorous and sheltering insects; carpets were forty-five years in the future. Walls were adorned with tapestries, which, under Charles I, would give way to paintings. Most people sat on benches or stools; a chair with a back was a luxury reserved for an honored guest or the master or mistress of the house; hence to “take the chair” came to mean to preside. Otherwise the furniture was strong and admirable: buffets, cabinets, tables, chests, four-posters were cut and mortised in walnut or oak to last for centuries; some beds, with thick mattresses of feather, embroidered coverings, and silk canopies, cost a thousand pounds and were the proudest heirloom of the home. Around or behind the house, in nearly all classes, a garden provided trees, shrubs, shade, and such flowers as women used to grace their homes and hair, and Shakespeare to scent his verse—primrose, hyacinth, honeysuckle, larkspur, sweet William, marigold, Cupid’s-flower, love-lies-bleeding, love-in-a-mist, lily of the valley, roses white or red, Lancaster or York. “God Almighty first planted a garden,” said Bacon, “without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks.”41

  Ornamentation of the person was often more costly than decoration of the home. No age surpassed Elizabethan England in splendor of dress. “Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,” advised Polonius. In moneyed ranks all the fashions of France, Italy, and Spain were merged to redeem the human figure from the depredations of appetite and time. Portia laughed at young Falconbridge—”I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior everywhere.”42 Elizabeth set an example and a vogue of finery, so that in her reign fashions changed repeatedly as common imitation blurred class distinction. “The fashion,” mourns a character in Much Ado about Nothing, “wears out more apparel than the man.”43 Sumptuary laws tried to end this sartorial chorea; so a statute of 1574, to heal “the wasting and undoing of a great number of young gentlemen” who were wearing their acres on their backs, decreed that none but the royal family, dukes, marquesses, and earls should wear purple, silk, cloth of gold, or sable furs; none but barons and their betters should sport furs, crimson or scarlet velvets, imported woolens, gold or silver or pearl embroidery.44 Such laws were soon evaded, for the ambitious bourgeoisie denounced them as not only invidious but restraining trade, and in 1604 they were repealed.

  Hats were of any shape or color, of velvet, wool, silk or fine hair. Outside the home and the court men wore them nearly always, even in church, doffing them ceremoniously on meeting a lady, but at once covering again. Men wore their hair as long as the women, and grew fancy beards. Around the neck both sexes wore a ruff, a collar of linen and cambric built upon a frame of pasteboard and wire, and stiffened into broad sharp pleats by “a certain liquid matter which they call starch,”45 which was then making its debut in England. Catherine de Médicis had introduced this noose into France (1533) as a small frill, but fashion expanded it into a pillory reaching to the ears.

  Clothing made women a temporarily impenetrable mystery. Half their day must have been taken up with taking on and taking off; “a ship is sooner rigged than a woman.”46 Even hair could be put off or on, for Elizabeth gave the example of wearing a wig, dyed to resemble the golden curls of her youth. False hair was common; poor women, said Shakespeare, sold their locks “by the weight.”47 Instead of hats most women preferred a tiny cap or a transparent net, which let their hair display its allure. Cosmetics colored the face and penciled the eyebrows; ears were pierced for pendants or rings; jewelry sparkled everywhere. The female ruff was as in men, but the bosom was sometimes bare to a point.48 Elizabeth, narrow-chested and long-bellied, set a fashion of prolonging the bodice or jacket triangularly to a sharp apex below the corseted waist. The skirt was spread out from the hips by a “farthingale” or hoop. Gowns of delicate material and elaborate design covered the legs. Silk stockings were introduced by the Queen. Skirts trailed, sleeves bulged, gloves were embroidered and perfumed. In summer a lady could speak with a jeweled fan, and utter thoughts too kind for words.

>   But life in the home was seldom in full dress. Breakfast at seven, dinner at eleven or twelve, supper at five or six redeemed the day. The main meal was near noon and plentiful. “The English,” said a Frenchman, “stuff their sacks.”49 Fingers still served in place of forks, which came into their present use in the reign of James I. Silver plate adorned prosperous homes; the hoarding of it was already a hedge against inflation. The lower middle classes had vessels of pewter; the poor got along with dishes of wood and spoons of horn. Meat, fish, and bread were the staple foods, and nearly everybody who could afford it suffered from gout. Dairy products were popular only in the countryside, for means of refrigeration were still scant in the towns. Vegetables were widely used only by the poor, who grew them in their garden plots. Potatoes, introduced from America by Raleigh’s expeditions, were a garden product, not yet a crop in the fields. Puddings were an English specialty, relished beyond dessert. Sweets were as favored as now; hence Elizabeth’s black teeth.

  These hearty meals required liquid lubricants—ale, cider, beer, and wine. Tea and coffee were not yet Anglicized. WhiskeyIII came into general use throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, being distilled from grain in the north, from wine in the south. Drunkenness was a protest against the damp climate; the phrase “drunk as a lord” suggests that this remedy rose in favor along the social scale. Tobacco was brought into England by Sir John Hawkins (1565), by Drake, and by Sir Ralph Lane; Raleigh made smoking of it fashionable at court, and took a puff or two before he went to the scaffold. In Elizabeth’s time it was too costly for its use to be widespread; at social gatherings a pipe might be passed around to let each guest get his quota. In 1604 King James sent forth a mighty Counterblast to Tobacco, lamenting its introduction into England and warning against “a certain venomous quality” in it.